obedience

As his life drew to a close in Karbilá in 1259 A.H., Siyyid Káẓim-i-Rashtí gathered his disciples and gave them the charge that the Dawn-Breakers treats as the immediate prologue to the Báb's Declaration: scatter yourselves over the face of the earth, detach yourselves from all earthly things, and seek the Promised One who is now manifest.

Shoghi Effendi's own narration, in *God Passes By*, of the events of late 1921 and early 1922 — the Master's passing, the discovery of the Will and Testament naming the young Shoghi as Guardian, and the formal beginning of the Formative Age of the Faith.

In Rúḥíyyih Khánum's biography *The Priceless Pearl* she describes the moment in November 1921 when a young Shoghi Effendi, reading the cable in Major Tudor Pole's London office, learned that 'Abdu'l-Bahá had passed — and how, only on his return to Haifa, the opening of the Master's Will revealed an office he had never imagined for himself.

In *The Revelation of Bahá'u'lláh* Adib Taherzadeh recounts the pilgrimage of Aḥmad-i-Yazdí — a believer of about sixty who walked, on foot, the 1,700 kilometres from Baghdád to Constantinople in search of Bahá'u'lláh in Adrianople. The Tablet that reached him by the wayside, the *Tablet of the Nightingale,* turned him from pilgrim into teacher and sent him another 2,240 kilometres back into Persia.

In *The World Order of Bahá'u'lláh*, Shoghi Effendi insisted on a single, load-bearing distinction: the administration of the Cause is *an instrument and not a substitute* for the Faith. To separate the spiritual teachings from the institutions, he warned, would be to mutilate the body of the Cause itself.